


Tossing Pennies

by Pen_to_parchment



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Song: the 1 (Taylor Swift), Songfic, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25492825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pen_to_parchment/pseuds/Pen_to_parchment
Summary: On a vacation to Rome and away from Jason and the rest of the Legion, Reyna manages to hit something on (t)he(i)r bucket list. An old thing that promises three things to those who wish on it. Of those three, she only wants one. Or two. But definitely not all three. Though, she does want something a tourist attraction has little power to grant.
Relationships: Jason Grace/Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	Tossing Pennies

**Author's Note:**

> That's right. I'm jumping on the folklore bandwagon. But also incorporating some juicy Roman legends. I know this isn't great, but I needed this song's feels to get out of my system.

Reyna knew the legend well. One coin. Two. Three. Wishes that would be granted if made the right way. And how a childhood pact led her to stand in front of the Trevi Fountain, two pennies nestled in her left palm, and another squeezed by the fingers of her right. With a sigh, she resumed her seat at the edge of the fountain. For easily the fifth time that day. When she had first arrived at the Piazza di Trevi, there was hardly a person in sight. Now, the sun was almost directly above the water. Afternoon light glinted off gentle ripples on its surface and bounced off the myriad coins littering the bottom. The city’s usual swarm of tourists buzzed around the fountain. She could almost imagine she was standing before the Little Tiber back in California. 

It was entirely irrational to be homesick, she knew. If anything, Rome should’ve been comforting. But looking at the marble statues, she couldn’t help waiting for one to come to life and engage her in political commentary. Fauns would’ve been scuba diving for spare change in the fountains back at camp, right about now. She found herself expecting Terminus to pop up somewhere, demanding she dispose of the dagger she’d concealed within the typical tourist garb. Just to be safe.

He’d be disappointed in her. The god of boundaries. Lines. Rules. Decisions. Terminus had always praised her judgment, _swift and final,_ he’d said. Though her choices then had usually been between dying or living. Fairly simple options. She supposed she was unused to the commodity of making decisions that didn’t affect her place in the land of the living. Better to cross a line than stand behind it wondering. Now, she couldn’t decide how many coins to toss. Well, it ran deeper than that, she admitted. She couldn’t decide what she wanted. 

One coin for safety. Two for love. Three for marriage. 

She definitely needed that first one, but the other two… she wasn’t too sure of. Unfortunately, she was there for the sole purpose of throwing three coins. It was on the bucket list. _Throw three coins in the Fontana di Trevi._ Right underneath _Visit Diocletian’s Palace._ Technically, she could’ve crossed that one off a while ago, but it was fun to take the tour when her life wasn’t in mortal peril. Of course, she wasn’t jet setting around the old Roman Empire just for fun. On all official documentation, this was “a leave of absence for purposes of research and rediscovery”. According to Gwen, this was a mandatory vacation sanctioned unanimously by the Senate. So, naturally, she set out to get through the bucket list she made with her best friend. What better use of her time was there? 

_Time,_ she thought idly. They say it heals all wounds. Or it can infect them with words left unsaid and looks lingering too long. Poison them until they scar over but leave an empty feeling in your bones. In her time in the Legion, she’d heard veterans talk about phantom pains. Their injuries themselves had healed, but the shadows of the aches endured. Reyna wondered if it worked the same way with people. Maybe that would explain why laughing blue eyes seemed to always lurk at the edges of her periphery. She thought she saw him at bus stops, airports, flitting through windows… She never did, though. Even now, his face flickered in and out of the crowd thronging around her. What accompanied him wasn’t pain, exactly, but some sense of loss. That wasn’t helped by the fact that she had sat at the edge of a fountain, much like this one, with him, once. 

_They’d sworn they were going to be productive. But that notion had been abandoned somewhere between the enchantment of the Californian afternoon, and the daydreams brought on by it. And so paperwork was left to lay limply on a bench. The Garden of Bacchus had been even more vibrant than usual, saturation turned up on the flowers and sky. They were almost high on it. Which is why she could hardly refuse when he insisted on practicing their coin tossing skills. Thanks to the latest addition to their list, his attention was on the fountain in the center of the garden. The thing couldn’t have been larger than a chariot wheel, and there wasn’t much room for coins to land, considering the statue in the middle, but he’d stood beside her with their backs to it in the name of_ practice. _They had laughed as denarii ricocheted off the wine god’s likeness, falling to their knees to rummage for the lost coins in the grass._

_Jason counted them off, and they both pulled their right arms over their left shoulders, hoping the coins would actually hit the water. Sure enough, Reyna’s sank with a satisfying_ plop. _He groaned as he crouched to retrieve his again._

_“How many coins would we throw, anyway?” Having pulled her coin from the water, she perched at the edge of the fountain._

_He joined her and shrugged. “All three, I guess.”_

_She wrinkled her nose at him. “You want to fall in love and get married?”_

_“That has to be the worst proposal ever.” He laughed at her look, then seemed to think of something. “What if we’re already in love by the time we visit? Would we still wish for it?”_

_Reyna had tried not to dwell too long on exactly what he’d said. “I don’t know. Does it matter? There’s a good chance we might never visit at all,” she reminded him. “And we probably wouldn’t even go together.”_

_Jason stayed quiet for several moments. They listened to the fountain gurgling behind them, watching the lights go out one by one in the city below. She’d thought maybe she had rained on his parade a bit too much. They had agreed the bucket list was a fantasy. An impossible dream, more than anything else, but the idea of it was real to him. She was considering apologizing when he surprised her._

_“Then we’ll go together or not at all.” He spoke like that solution was obvious. “It wouldn’t be fair for one of us to do all of it alone. Promise?”_

_For some reason, she’d found it difficult to meet his eyes. She had told herself it was because of the sun setting behind him like a halo. “Promise.”_

_“Good. In the meantime, I’m sure Bacchus can grant our wishes.” He smiled wryly at her and winked before turning around and tossing two coins over his shoulder._

Safety and love. 

_Reyna laughed and shook her head as they settled to the bottom in a soft flash of silver._

She turned the coins over in her hand, her fingers trailing lazily through the water behind her. Could a promise be broken again if it had been broken already? She told herself it didn’t matter. At least she still had promises left to break. And that was one of them. Going together as they’d promised was no longer an option. But she still felt like he was following her. Had he been with her there, it _would’ve_ been fun. Not part of some last-ditch effort to leave his ghost in Rome. If she threw the coins, saw the statues, visited the landmarks, then she could stop imagining what it would have been like to throw and see and visit with someone else. She could stop being haunted by the things they didn’t do and the words they didn’t say. In short, a fine vacation, really. Just full of research and rediscovery.

The legend hadn’t changed in millennia. Generations of travelers had thrown coins of all kinds into those waters, wishing for safe passage home and someone to welcome them once they got there. Ages of wishes, and she had to be the only person to ever face her current problem. Or the only person stupid enough to agree to a pact neither of them could keep. It wasn’t lost on her that she was in Rome to forget about Jason and the Legion. And yet, they were all she could think about. She hated that he could still affect her choices. They used to think the distance between New York and California was the farthest they could get away from each other. Dimly, Reyna wondered just how far she was sitting from the gates of Elysium. 

It was that morbid thought that got her to rise to her feet and turn around again. Her arm crossed her body, and her fingers released a coin in one smooth, fluid motion. She had a lot of practice, after all. When she heard a quiet splash echo behind her, she didn’t think of it so much as making a wish: but letting go of one. Two more coins followed. As they broke the water’s surface, they mended a fragmented promise. This fountain was huge. One would need exceptionally bad aim to miss here. Maybe they had just missed one too many times. Missed words and looks and chances, and yes, wishes. But they had been something. Something that had forgotten that wishes _could_ come true sometimes. 

Reyna sighed and walked back through the Piazza. She didn’t turn around again. 

She crossed that line. And she crossed the Trevi Fountain off that damn list.


End file.
